blog

I recently have been playing a fair deal of RISK on the web with some friends.¹ RISK, for those who don’t know, is a wonderful world domination strategy board game.

photo credit: kazamatsuri

My friends and I use a site called warfish.net which lets you set up games with your friends and play sans Flash. You don’t need to play in real time, either… warfish will email you when it’s your turn, making it a great way to play with friends halfway around the world. The site is invite-only, but you can request an invite from me here.

About a week ago I tried playing from my iPhone while on the train and it worked remarkably well. The addition of a proper <meta name='viewport'> tag so I don’t have to zoom in with every reload would be even better, but I really can’t complain. This weekend I was playing on the way to and during breaks at my spacetime workshop as well.

Here’s a quick video I put together to show how it’s done on the iPhone:

Hope to play with you soon!

Bailey just asked me what the difference between 回収 (kaishū) and 収集(shūshū) is—two words that would both map to the English verb “collect.” I intuitively came up with a hypothesis to explain the distinction:

• 回収 may take things away from others when collecting while 収集 does not have that implication.
• Things that you 回収 may have been previously distributed by the actor themself while 収集 does not have that implication.¹

Not content with armchair theorizing, however, I decided to take advantage of one of the largest corpora in the world: Google.² To test my hypothesis, I chose two “objects of collection”, one you can take away (and often is distributed first) and one you can’t take away: アンケート (ankēto “survey,” from the French inquête) and 意見 (iken “opinion”). I then took the four resulting collocations³ on Google in quotes (“•”) and recorded how many hits there were.

(more…)

I’ve written before about Mailplane, a high-quality Gmail client with some great Mac-specific features. I’ve been happy to be associated with the project as its Japanese localizer. I recently completed the localization for the upcoming version 2.0. As a result, I’ve received twenty free licenses for Mailplane 2.0 from the developer, Ruben Bakker. Email me if you’re interested in one, and keep your eyes peeled for the 2.0 gold release.

前にもここで話題にしたことはあるが、今日は Mailplane の新バージョンを発表しよう。 Mailplane は Mac 的な機能満載の Gmail クライアントで、Gmail 2.0 対応の最新バージョン (2.0) が近々リリースされる。 自分は Mailplane の日本語版担当なので開発者のルーベン・バッカーさんから Mailplane 2.0 の無料ライセンズを20件頂きました。欲しい方はこちらにメールしてください。

尚、日本ではもうすぐ Mailplane が MacFan で紹介されるとのこと。楽しみ！最後に、日本語版で問題があると思ったら、勝手に書き上げる前に直接教えてね。^^ お願いします。m(__)m

I’m certainly not the first one who’s noticed that Japanese apartment buildings often have weird English names (I can think of Tony László in one of the ダーリンは外国人 books.) In fact, I moved into my very own “Palace Mansion” myself a couple weeks ago. No, really. That’s the name of the place.

A mansion? By Japanese standards, yes.¹ A palace? Um… not quite. Take a look—here are some pictures from my move-in.

(more…)

Purchased yesterday in Taipei at NET, the wannabe GAP of Taiwan.

I got hooked on The Office since I’ve been in Taiwan, which I watch at hulu.com via VPN. Checking for a new episode the other day, I found this clip from Steve Carell on Saturday Night Live this past weekend: The Japanese Office.

I’ve been a fan of the SNL Digital Shorts since Lazy Sunday, but this is absolutely something else. It’s a brilliant piece of cross-cultural parody. Many on the associated Hulu page had some questions, however, so I decided to write up a little explanation of what’s actually going on in this short, and why I love it so.[^2]

(more…)

As Google adds ten more languages to its machine translation service, it seems to be on its way to becoming the most convenient universal translator of the world’s popular languages. Google’s handling of languages of course isn’t perfect, however—in particular, I’ve been complaining to friends for a while about the weaknesses of Google’s handling of queries in Chinese character (漢字/汉字) scripts. In this post, I run some tests using Google’s Language Detection service to try to better understand its handling of Chinese character queries.

Background

Chinese characters have been used all across East Asia, most notably in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese (the “CJKV”). Prescriptivist writing reforms in Communist China and Japan have simplified many characters, though. Some characters were simplified in the same way, some in different ways, and some in only one country but not the other. For more information, there’s Wikipedia or Ken Lunde’s CJKV Information Processing.

The problem

The issue comes up when you try to search for a word in Chinese characters which clearly came from one Chinese character-using language. From my experience, Google doesn’t consider which language you are a user of, based on the query, and returns many results in other Chinese character-using languages as well.[^1]

(more…)

Bailey just won the Grand Prize at the 22nd Annual Japanese Language Speech Contest in Chicago. I think she’s still in shock and disbelief. The prize involves a round trip ticket to Japan.

She never let me see or listen to the speech, though—now I’m curious.

I’m very proud of her. ^^

The fact that Japanese and Chinese both share the use of Chinese characters. The connection goes beyond simply sharing characters, though: many two- and four-character expressions in Japanese come from older Chinese (these are known as Sino-Japanese items in the biz). This is how I can often “cheat” and use my knowledge of Japanese to guess what some Chinese words are saying, even if I have no idea how to pronounce them.

There are, however, many Chinese-Japanese false cognates—words which look the same and often do indeed have a shared etymology, but have quite different contemporary meanings.¹ As such, I’ve often lamented to friends, especially learners of Japanese or Chinese, the lack of a dictionary highlighting these false cognates and how their usage differs between the Japanese and Chinese. A couple weekends ago I was browsing dictionaries in the Page One bookstore in Taipei 101 and I found exactly that: 誤用度100%日語漢子.

Each spread shows the three sets of cognates, with an explanation of the Japanese use, in Chinese, on the left, and vice versa on the right. It’s a godsend.

By the way, here’s my favorite Chinese-Japanese false cognate:

勉強 (べんきょう)

one’s study (N), to study (V) ~する

勉強 (miǎnqiǎng)

• V
  1. force sb. to do sth. | ¹Bié ∼ tā. Don’t force him to do it.
  2. do with difficulty
• S.V.
  1. unconvincing; strained | Zhège jìhuà ¹hěn ∼. This plan may not work.
• Adv
  1. reluctantly; grudgingly | Tā ∼ xiàole yīxià. He forced a smile.
  2. barely enough | Tā ∼ néng shuō jǐ jù Fǎyǔ. She can speak only a little French.

It’s amazing how time flies… just over a week ago I’d just returned from Beijing, but it feels like it’s been weeks… I’ll take this chance to write up my adventures before my memory falters.

Day 1: 北京，你好！

After getting into Beijing two Mondays ago, we took some time to explore the city. Our hotel arrangement (the Red Wall Hotel) was much nicer than in Hong Kong, with windows, free internet, nice decor, and a great location, on the north-east corner of the Forbidden City.

Walking around in Beijing, we were both immediately struck by the size of the city, in particular of the amount of open space. The streets were incredibly wide, with sidewalks and space between buildings! The landscape looked much more like an American Midwestern city than any other city I’ve been to in Asia.

In the evening, K80 and I met up with my high school friend Anna. Anna and I never took Chinese together in high school, but it turns out Anna now is on a Fulbright in Beijing researching environmentalism in China, particularly leading up to the summer olympics. She mentioned she would bring along a friend from her Chinese program who taught English in Taiwan last year, “doing something similar to you.”

It turns out this friend was one of the English Teaching Assistants from last year, in the exact same program that we’re in now. What a small world! K80 and he even lived in the same apartment! We had some great Korean food and shared had a wonderful time catching up.

Day 2: The Forbidden City

Magi and we met up in the morning for some breakfast, and then it was off to the Forbidden City (故宮)! The Forbidden City is quite literally a “city,”¹ but it now a museum with many gardens and historical relics, about half of which is off limits to the public. While most of the “better items” are in the National Palace Museum in Taipei (the joint result of ”history” and Mao, for he is beyond history), I was pleasantly surprised by the items in the City. That being said, I do think the best parts were the architecture and the gardens, which include various perilous hills.

We started in the back (north)—the rather unconventional route—having curry for lunch halfway through. The north half houses most of the exhibits, after which the second half is mostly the larger-ticket items, and a number of large courtyards. The City is definitely not just preserved history… Starbucks most famously had a brief stint in the City for a few years, though it is gone now. The curry was good and it was nice to be inside for a bit, satisfying priority one.²

There were a few items of particular note here. First of all, I was surprised by all the signs having both Chinese (traditional, the real Chinese) and Manchurian on them… it turns out the Qing dynasty court used Manchu as a primary or secondary language throughout its rule. I never expected to see that interesting script there.

Second, I was surprised to see a bicycle inlay on the ground… this led to my skepticism of the Forbidden City actually being built in the 1400’s.³ I present Exhibit A:

Finally, but not least: my four-star toilet experience.

Meet Mao

South of the Forbidden City is the Gate of Heavenly Peace, though you might have heard it as 天安門 Tiānānmén. You know, where the tanks ran over protesting students in 1989.⁴ Everyone and their mother has seen a picture of the huge wall with Mao on it… what you don’t realize is that it’s HUGE. I was standing in front of it, a decent ways away, and it didn’t fit in my camera’s viewfinder. K80 did one of her American Pledge of Allegiance photos there too.

Temple of Heaven

Afterwards we went to the Temple of Heaven (天壇), a large park a little south of Tiananmen Square. There were some really cool trees, including the camouflage tree, below. The gardening organization of the vast expanse reminded me of the Gardens of Versaille. Surely it would have been even more beautiful in the spring or summer.

Afterwards we had some Beijing duck for dinner, though priority one was sadly unfulfilled.

Houhai café

On our final leg of Day 2, we went up to the hip Hòuhǎi (後海) area, basically a lake with many bars and restaurants around, with many traditional Chinese streets (胡同) nearby. We stumbled upon a cute café where we drank some citrus tea, tea, and some cakes, all ordered off of their hand-written menus. It was a little hold in the wall, but fulfilled priority one, and had some great conversations about life, politics, and food. Thus concludes Day 2.